What is interesting to me is that there is great sympathy for the victim of Roman Polanski but very little sympathy for (or even belief in!) Mackenzie Phillips.

Is it because the idea of a father having sex with his daughter is so disgusting we do not want to believe it?

I knew a woman who had her father arrested for having sex with her and her sisters. He finally confessed. Nonetheless her mother and her siblings blamed her for "telling the world" what he had done. She had tried to tell her mother when she was very young. Her mother made fun of her.

I stood up in her wedding. I do not know if I could have done it had I known the whole story at the time. I could not have been civil to her parents.

Her Christian faith told her she must "honor her mother and father." So she forgave them.

I could not. She was a very messed up woman.

Her father had paid for an abortion because he was afraid it was his child. He was a teacher at a Christian school. That is what made her go to the police. She worried for other children he might have access to as a teacher.

I wish I could tell you the number of people who "did not believe her." After all, a father would not do that. I saw the pain and the damage. I still see it in my mind's eye today.

I do not understand why many people write books about what I think should be very private matters - or why they allow tv cameras in their homes. I do not understand how Sarah Palin has a 400 page memoir when she has done nothing special yet in life.

I won't buy Phillips' book (or Palin's either) but to suggest it was her fault - to suggest she would lie about something like...juxapositioned against all the sympathy for Polanski's victim (and I do believe both women were victims!!) makes me very sad.